In fact, Kar­en Colville said, when she and Jor­dyn went shop­ping for a new dress for Jor­dyn to wear to the Young Her­oes Awards ce­re­mony, Jor­dyn sug­ges­ted to her moth­er that they just shop at Tar­get to save money.

“I told her, ‘I’ll take you any­where you want,’ and she said, ‘I don’t want you spend­ing a lot of money,’” Kar­en Colville said. “She thinks a lot about oth­er people.”

Shar­on Shea, a teach­er at the school, nom­in­ated young Colville for the award due to her work with sev­er­al pro­grams — Colville took the lead on an anti-bul­ly­ing ini­ti­at­ive, did work for Op­er­a­tion Gifts for Giv­ing, helped co­ordin­ate a school wide re­cyc­ling pro­gram and helped raise money for Alex’s Lem­on­ade Stand.

In an in­ter­view Aug. 10 at her Le­fevre Street home, Colville dis­cussed her mo­tiv­a­tions as a young lead­er and the de­tails of her in­volve­ments.

“I just think it’s very fun be­cause I’m help­ing oth­er kids and hav­ing fun at the same time,” Colville said of her work.

As pres­id­ent of her school’s branch of the Na­tion­al Ele­ment­ary Hon­or So­ci­ety, she took it upon her­self to spear­head the school ef­forts that led to her nom­in­a­tion and win.

Colville or­gan­ized a re­cyc­ling pro­gram that ar­ranged for a group of stu­dents that would go from classroom to classroom col­lect­ing plastic bottles to re­cycle. If a stu­dent turned in a bottle, he or she re­ceived a tick­et that would go in­to a draw­ing for a prize at the end of each week.

“There’s re­cyc­ling bins every­where [at the school] but we nev­er use them,” she said. “I thought we would get a lot [of bottles] if we just gave them tick­ets for it.” She ad­ded that stu­dents got ex­cited about the pro­gram, and one stu­dent brought in two trash bags full of bottles.

She also helped or­gan­ize and con­trib­uted to the school’s ef­forts for Op­er­a­tion Gifts for Giv­ing, which donates toys to the chil­dren of act­ive duty mil­it­ary par­ents dur­ing the hol­i­days.

For her in­volve­ment with Alex’s Lem­on­ade Stand, Colville and oth­er stu­dents sold lem­on­ade and lem­on­ade-flavored cook­ies at par­ent-teach­er con­fer­ences after school, and even­tu­ally sur­passed their goal of rais­ing $1,000.

Colville said she had a lot of fun help­ing or­gan­ize an anti-bul­ly­ing pro­gram at Brides­burg Ele­ment­ary. She and oth­er stu­dents cre­ated posters dis­play­ing anti-bul­ly­ing mes­sages and pos­ted them throughout the school.

“We tried mak­ing them [the groups] fun so kids would want to be in it,” she said.

Colville, who said she’d like to be either a doc­tor or a crime scene in­vest­ig­at­or as a ca­reer, said she felt very proud and ex­cited when she heard she won the Young Her­oes Award.

She said she feels that the groups she helped to be­come suc­cess­ful set a good ex­ample for oth­er kids at Brides­burg Ele­ment­ary.

“Some kids in the be­gin­ning of school year didn’t care if they got in trouble,” she said. “Do­ing all the pro­grams, I think it helped them listen more and [real­ize] that they wanted to be in­volved.”

Kar­en Colville said she knows that her daugh­ter is def­in­itely a lead­er, and she’s a very proud par­ent.

“She’s very head­strong about what she does,” she said of her daugh­ter. “I wasn’t sur­prised [that Jor­dyn won the award], but I was of course very proud.”